My Koi

My Koi

Very well done virtual fish pond. Excellently realistic graphics and fish movement/behaviour. Good ambient sounds.

Also, the developer is amazingly active and responsive to suggestions. I’ve already seen 2 updates within hours of the suggestion being posted on the forum!

I’ve tried writing a more comprehensive review with a couple of suggestions, but every time click ‘Post review’ the button disappears and nothing else happens. I hope this minimal review is ‘accepted’, and will take up the other points I wanted to make up the forum.

Real player with 1127.9 hrs in game


Read More: Best Nature Beautiful Games.


I’ve always wanted a koi pond, but I don’t have the space to put one since I have a small yard. My Koi piqued my interest for that very reason. This is a koi pond simulator, and a great one at that. If you’re expecting a riveting narrative, Michael Bay-esque explosions, and epic fights between good and evil, then My Koi is not the game you’re looking for. If you’re into a relaxing experience, then this is a great option.

Here’s the gist: you’re given three ponds and a limited number of koi to create and put into each pond. You’ll have the ability to feed your koi and watch them grow over time. This doesn’t mean there’s no challenge. One of your koi must hit a certain weight and length milestone in order to unlock more customization options for your koi. You’re also able to put more koi into each pond as you hit these milestones. It incentivizes you to care for your koi daily. You can at least feed the koi once a day, and they’ll be happy.

Real player with 208.6 hrs in game

My Koi on Steam

Skip Lake

Skip Lake

Short, not too difficult reflection game. Usually these mechanics are used with light rays that have to end up in a certain location; in this case it’s a stone that magically keeps bouncing over water. Difficulty is not very consistent, some puzzles will take some pondering and tweaking and retrying, others will be clear at the first glance.

I very much liked the visuals and the sound effects, and found myself looking for longer routes to listen to the new ‘melodies’. The soundtrack was definitely not for me, and I had to turn it off every single time I started the game. It also did not remember my preference to play windowed and bounced back to full screen every restart. My last little peeve was that you can’t return to the menu or home screen between levels - you have to start or redo a level to get back the menu.

Real player with 3.6 hrs in game


Read More: Best Nature Top-Down Games.


Casual puzzles with a peaceful ambience. Most solutions amount to lining up the most intuitive positions, with a few requiring some more tries. While quite easy, it is fun and rewarding. There are also hidden objects to find which give a bit of story. My only issues: no touchscreen support, so it’s a lot of touchpad/mouse clicking. Also the backgrounds move when you move your cursor,even when you are just moving from the reflectors to the start button on every level, which I found a little annoying. It would be nice to be able to turn this off and have the screen only move when you actually move the cursor to an edge.

Real player with 3.2 hrs in game

Skip Lake on Steam

Aka

Aka

Ride a bike, watch the clouds, swim in the hot springs under a blossom tree… or take a nap on a giant capybara

Experiment with a farming system inspired by permaculture.

Gather resources to craft shelters, tools, props, food…

Explore different biomes, from cloud forests to snowy mountains.


Read More: Best Nature Open World Games.


Aka on Steam

Campground Owner

Campground Owner

Campground owner is very suitable to your needs.

I recommend picking a map with more land then water. You can pick seasons (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall).

In creative mode, you have unlimited cash. I almost always do creative mode. If you want to put anything on the map, I’d recommend that. There is also a survival mode where you have to earn money. You can get that from campers.

If you like to speed up time, press 1(slow), 2 (medium), 3( super fast).

You can’t put different camper’s tent, chairs, grill, or camper together, or it will show the camper’s gear red.

Real player with 6.9 hrs in game

Fun game for some time, I really like being able to place the items of campers down myself in spots that give the most money, and it’s fun trying to get all stars and see money go up.

There are some downsides though, some quality of life improvements that I would like to see.

Once a camper is placed, you cannot see info about them, like with how many they are, how much they’ll pay or for how long they stay. You can see this when they ask to be placed, but still would be nice to keep track of the stay’s duration.

Real player with 1.5 hrs in game

Campground Owner on Steam

FISHERY

FISHERY

This could be a very lovely game, I cant recommend it at this point, but I have high hopes this could be getting somewhere.

What I like:

The style is lovely! The fish and plants are stylized to a point to make it look artsy, but you still recognize every species, it is realy beautifully made.

The animations are very cute, the fish chase each other, nibble on plants and decorations, I love it. :)

I like that the fish are breeding and the babys are realy cute.

What I dont like:

I played with one tank for 63 ingame days. In that time I had 3 adult platys and a ton of babys.

Real player with 21.6 hrs in game

I’ve been keeping fish for a long time and it has been my dream to find an, detailed and good fish keeping game. Over the years all the fish keeping games I found were either very old or abandoned. But fishery might finally be the game. It has many things already added so it’s a perfect early access game. It does lack a lot of stuff. But it is still good enough to provide you fun until new updates roll out. Fishery already provides the things you would want in an aquarium game. It already has 18 fish species that are for now mostly freshwater and it has 17 plant species that come in different sizes and variants. There are lots of decoration items that help you create the aquarium you always wanted. There are around 10 substrates. I think they can add more into substrates. Such as different substrates being beneficial for different situations. Or they can just add more substrates or even substrate mixing. One of my favorite features of fishery is the plumbing system. Not only it is unique but the idea of being able to hide all the filtration and heaters an all that stuff is amazing. And lastly something no other game has (At least from what I’ve played.) breeding. So far there is a single gamemode. Sandbox. But a career mode is coming. I would say if you so far like this game consider a few things: First it’s early access so there is a possibility you might not find the content you need. Second the game is slightly more detailed for some people. Third if you love saltwater more there aren’t many fish or plant variants yet.

Real player with 5.3 hrs in game

FISHERY on Steam

Flower

Flower

THE ONE-SENTENCE SUMMARY…

Flower is a charming, artistic, ambient game that is worth picking up during a Steam sale to enjoy (and find your calm) for around five hours.

[➕] THE POSITIVES

  • The ART. A cornerstone of the game is its art style! The game marvelously captures the feeling of gliding through warm, grassy fields and tight canyon corridors on the currents of the wind, and is a cacophony of color as you spread and bloom life into the world. It’s an unequivocally colorful and wonderfully beautiful game!

Real player with 6.3 hrs in game

Flower is a rather unique and relaxing experience! It’s a pretty short game, with 6 levels, each starting you off with a single petal. You essentially control the wind, blowing the petal into other flowers to make them bloom, collecting more petals to fly around the map with. As you make more flowers bloom, you bring more light and colour to the map.

The levels are much more varied than I was first expecting, and the environments, while starting pretty plain, generally turn into beautiful, vibrant scenes once you’ve flown through, making the flowers bloom. Even the credits in Flower are done in a unique and wonderful manner, essentially being an extra level for the player to fly through. From my playthrough, there’s one level that’s not as relaxing, particularly if you’re trying to get the achievements, but it’s still a great experience, and makes the following level extra special! They stunning world is truly complemented by the music and sounds too, greatly adding to the whole experience!

Real player with 5.7 hrs in game

Flower on Steam

Guppy

Guppy

Relaxing fun, especially when you get good at swimming fast.

Controller support didn’t work for me (Steam/Linux) but configured as keyboard instead.

For the price well worth a punt.

Real player with 2.9 hrs in game

Guppy is a poetic game, which lets you control a fish by moving its tail left and right.

No other control is used; and every movement of the tail is propelling the fish in the direction of the movement. Used alternatively, left and right movements allow the fish to progress forward, or any way you so desire; by gauging how much of each movement to produce.

Both the left and right sticks can be used; but the game really shines when shoulder controls are used, epecially the analog ones. I am unsure as if the game is using them in an analog fashion (I think not), but using them feels most natural to me.

Real player with 2.7 hrs in game

Guppy on Steam

Hidden Shapes Animals - Jigsaw Puzzle Game

Hidden Shapes Animals - Jigsaw Puzzle Game

Really enjoyed the chill vibe (my wife was listening to me play, and the music was soothing her to sleep, lol), and the puzzles were progressively challenging, but not frustratingly so - at least I didn’t find them that way. I also appreciated that the hint system (which I needed a few times to ferret out some misoriented pieces that weren’t at all obvious to me) doesn’t penalize you in any way. If you’re looking for a nice, relaxing, puzzle game, definitely give this one a go. I’ll definitely look out for other stuff put out by this developer. :-)

Real player with 3.6 hrs in game

A dollar gets you a nice set of nature themed puzzles on a dark background that is easy on the eyes. The images are solved by turning the pieces in place, not by moving them on the board. So there is no ‘dragging and dropping’ which I like. Pieces only turn one way so if you turn it one too far you have to turn it three more times to get it back where you want it. The line art is nice and a starry background appears when you finish each puzzle. The music is peaceful. Best played in the dark to appreciate the night-sky visual theme. Good for a relaxing, casual puzzle. Note: using the hint function, press the hint button again to get back to puzzle-solving mode. The pieces are locked in the the hint mode and can’t be turned.

Real player with 3.3 hrs in game

Hidden Shapes Animals - Jigsaw Puzzle Game on Steam

Hike

Hike

Hike is from MorningShift studios a single Indie Dev. This is his second game, the previous one being ‘Work Trip’. Like before his target audience is mainly those who are interested in easy achievement farming or an easy difficulty walking simulator.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a ring of indie Devs that are all too willing to give a thumbs up regardless of the product produced, doing each other a favour. On top of this there are dozens of curators who simply copy and paste misleading reviews simply in the effort to get more free games. I mean seriously … You compare this to ‘Fire Watch’? ‘Dear Esther?’ are you serious? Your curator privilege should be revoked and given to a gerbil.

Real player with 4.7 hrs in game

I’m giving this a Thumbs Up to support the developers and because I see what they were trying to do here, but my true feelings about this one are Mixed. Hike is a short interactive experience where the point is to go camping in the woods, explore the place, and relax. I hesitate to call it a game because there’s almost no game-like objectives here. Sure there’s some jumping and seeking and exploring, but those aren’t the point of Hike: the sole purpose of this is to be a walking sim in the woods, to get a little lost, to look around. That’s it. There’s no real replayability once you’ve experienced it once, except maybe to get all of the achievements because one’s sorta easy to miss. The visuals and music are both quite pretty, but it’s obvious that this was more supposed to be a general demo of what Morning Shift Studios can do with the Unity engine. In fact, you’ll probably know based on my description if Hike is for you or not.

Real player with 2.4 hrs in game

Hike on Steam

Leaf Tree

Leaf Tree

Relaxing atmosphere + pleasant/challenging puzzles

Real player with 1.4 hrs in game

This game has potential if it was developed upon, Took me a total of 1 hr and 16 mins to complete. Not bad.

I would recommend the game if you have a spare hour and honestly just looking for something to pass the time.

Some things i would add/change if i was the developer;

  • Pause screen (Instead of hitting ESC to pause instead closes the game)

  • Mute music only button, I think the sounds are good except the music. Found that annoying.

  • Make the “Level Complete” stand out more.

  • Allow level replayability.

Real player with 1.3 hrs in game

Leaf Tree on Steam